I am a Russian, and I support the efforts of the Committee to Investigate Russia. I even think that Morgan Freeman’s much-maligned video remarks are a good thing. Here’s why.
I lived in Russia for almost thirty years before I had to leave it due to threats against my life stemming from my work as a journalist. I know my country and my countrymen all too well, and I understand the cynicism of Putin’s Kremlin and of all the people who serve the regime. I have been covering Russian affairs for TAI for more than a year, and regular readers ought to know by now the general outlines of how I see things. But for those who don’t, let me summarize: Putin doesn’t have any concrete ideas about rewriting the world order, or fundamentally shifting America’s role in it. He is doing what he is doing in order to survive, to preserve his own ill-gotten wealth, and the wealth of those close to him as well.
Putin is nothing more than a kleptocrat with KGB training and an opportunist with excellent tactical instincts. He has used these skills to directly benefit himself and those around him, all the while co-opting and corrupting the rest of the Russian state, which was already weakened in the years after the fall of communism. While the West kept quiet about his anti-democratic tendencies (which, let’s be honest, were obvious from early on in his presidency), Putin enjoyed a friendly relationship with the United States and Europe. And he truly seems to have believed that the principle of reciprocity would apply: the West would let him do what he wanted to do in his country, because he never tried to dictate to Washington or Berlin or London what to do in theirs. But as Putin’s behavior, both within Russia’s borders and beyond them, became too much for the West to ignore, Putin chose to retaliate by the most effective means at his disposal: spreading chaos and making a mess in his enemies’ houses.
To do so, he reached for the best tool at hand, one that his friends in the security services had been perfecting for years. Disinformation campaigns leveraging social media are a powerful, yet not very expensive, weapon. Russia’s infamous Olgino troll factory was created several years ago. Given the egregious corruption in Russia’s defense industry, setting up Olgino cost a lot less than designing and building next-generation missiles. Coupled with Russia’s non-internet media empire, both domestic and overseas, Putin has a powerful megaphone allowing him to spread mistrust, confusion, and fear far and wide. The West has had difficulty adjusting.
If you were to try to measure the success of Putin’s policies in terms of altering Western behavior, you might think that the tools have not worked all that well. But to do so is to misunderstand their purpose. For example, recall the infamous “Lisa” case in Germany. A young Russian-German girl went missing in January 2016, and when she turned up the next day, she told her parents that she had been abducted and repeatedly raped by migrants of Middle Eastern descent. Though German police had interviewed the young girl and had concluded that the story didn’t add up (it turns out Lisa had spent the night at a male friend’s house), Russian television, beamed via satellite to Russian-speaking viewers living in Germany, and social media outlets jumped on the story. Several anti-immigrant rallies sprung up in the following days, and tensions escalated to the point that Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized German authorities for covering up the crime. The goal of the stunt, however, was not to turn voters against Angela Merkel’s migrant policies; those were already growing unpopular enough without the Kremlin’s direct intervention. The goal was to add gasoline to an already combustible situation, and to create social disorder on command. “Lisa” demonstrated to the Germans that the Kremlin’s disinformation toolkit could get people onto the streets with just a little bit of effort.
The combustible situation in Charlottesville last month is a perfect illustration of a parallel vulnerability in the United States, with racial tensions playing the analogue to the fear of migrants in Europe. There is no evidence that Charlottesville was in any way engineered by Russia, but the Kremlin’s social media assets appear to have been trying to capitalize on it after the fact, trying to maximize the disruptive effects of the violence. It would not surprise me if the Kremlin’s cyber-propagandists are even more aggressive and proactive in spreading unrest when the next opportunity presents itself. Nor would it surprise me if Russian “active measures” in the future include creating opportunities out of whole cloth: a Russian agent provocateur killing a white supremacist while posing as an Antifa activist, for instance. (If you can’t imagine Russia going to such lengths, dear reader, I fear you are not nearly cynical enough to properly understand this regime.)
My colleague Sean Keeley fairly criticizes the Committee to Investigate Russia for the lack of expertise of its members. And he is right to worry about what amounts to anti-intellectualism and paranoia being spouted by some of the most fevered activists working to counter Russian propaganda these days. But at the end of the day, Bellingcat didn’t start out as a group of highly trained digital sleuths either; nevertheless the group managed to play a major role in the investigation surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russian forces in Ukraine in 2014.
In these matters, an excess of vigilance is unquestionably a good thing. The more people are aware of just how cynical and manipulative Russian efforts can be, the less fruits their efforts will bear.
Disinformation, however, is but one element in a broader strategic approach for Russia. In many ways, it is a junior partner to a far more prevalent means of gaining influence: financial corruption.
Overall, Russia is a weak and poor country dependent on Western financing. But the Kremlin has more than enough money to buy individual Europeans and Americans. As a Russian businessman with business concerns in Europe once told me, the difference between corruption in Russia and in the West is that Russian officials brazenly steal money all the time and at every opportunity, while Westerners will usually wait for their opportunity to cash out. For Russians, life is short and the future is uncertain, so it’s best to have everything right now. In the West, officials are less pushy about it—and less greedy: a couple million dollars for a proper retirement will suffice.
This is the insight that motivated the research and writing of our piece tracing the murky web of connections surrounding Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalya Veselnitskaya earlier this year. There is nothing yet publicly known that suggests that Trump, Jr. was in any way compromised. But for those who understand Russia, it’s clear as day what the Kremlin was trying to do.
And as is usually the case, money and disinformation work hand-in-glove. Recall that at the heart of the murky Veselnitskaya affair was a lobbying effort to repeal the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act, as well as to block passage of the related “Global” Magnitsky Act. And at the heart of that lobbying effort was a mendacious film, shown at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that suggested the bill’s advocates had in fact defrauded Russian taxpayers. Various European countries had refused to screen the film, recognizing it for the propaganda effort it was. But it found an audience in Washington, DC, where it was shown after some back-and-forth in the press concerning the filmmaker right to be heard. Immediately after the film was shown, Akhmetshin was running to and fro on Capitol Hill, lobbying furiously.
The Russian effort came up empty. We here at TAI tried to do our small part to swat down this elaborate propaganda effort at the time, as did others. And ultimately, the Global Magnitsky did pass the House successfully. But just because the Kremlin’s scheme didn’t work out does not mean that awareness is not important. Putin’s regime is extremely cynical; Americans, by contrast, are in general much more optimistic, and as a result have a vibrant, open society to show for it. And while it may be an article of faith among some that openness always triumphs over cynicism, I personally am not convinced. Openness must be coupled with vigilance and a clear-eyed view of the motivations of others to survive. It’s for this reason that I support all the efforts to highlight Russian perfidy and machinations, be they in the realm of financial corruption or disinformation. One can’t have enough of it.
